My First 50 Weeks Inside Belle Park

Sometimes, you get tossed in the children’s psych ward, but only so long as the insurance company foots the bill. Problem is: it can fuck you up for life.

Randy Marcott
Wed, May 20 2015

The day I was “deposited” at Belle Park Hospital happened to be my mother’s birthday. I’ve always found this semi-hysterical, as she institutionalized me at least partially for trying to kill her. I was released 364 days later, to which my mother remarked “this is the best birthday gift I could’ve asked for.”

Before the doors to the children’s wing swung shut, locking away my ten-year-old self, my parents seemed to want to apologize for the action by making an unannounced stop at Chuck-e-Cheese’s. It was Thursday, before noon, and we were the only ones there.

As a child, I was excessively violent and uncontrollable and tried to kill both of my parents. I can easily see why a “mental health care solution” – I was told repeatedly to never call it a hospital! – seemed like a good, if not the only, solution for me. The children’s wing only housed twelve patients and was at capacity when I was officially committed in June 1985, so I enjoyed my summer as I normally did (free), until a bed opened up in the insurance approved institution. All I could do was remember those long, endless summer days, as I laid down on an old, sticky mattress after all of my belongings had been separated into multiple piles, then separated from me. There, I entered a 72 hour suicide watch like the other patients, so even my jeans were contraband. I was constantly under observation so that I would not kill myself.

Alone. This was not the first time I had felt alone, but it was the first time I felt alone for one year straight. And when I returned to the world, that feeling never went away. Inside, I learned to hide everything. My precise feelings got me in trouble, so I answered “oh, I’m good,” whenever I was angry, depressed, whatever really. I was even punished for my imagination. I was called out and placed in isolation for seeing wings on things, for noticing potential lying dormant everywhere, for understanding that my spoon could be both weapon and key.

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Randy Marcott is an educator who currently lives in Buenos Aires. He gave up on America and its horrific excuse of a health care system in 2010 and has traveled the globe teaching ever since. When not teaching you will find him writing, reading or cooking. This, of course, is when he is not helping cats plan a global takeover (hint: 2016).